I had to ask my website designer/host (Website Design for Accommodation (WDFA)) to install the Vacation Soup Plugin as they have limited my ability to add plugins myself. – !

They tell me this has now been installed.

It is not listed under “Plugins” in the Dashboard, and they tell me I must contact you for advice as to how to access it and use it. I am somewhat sceptical about this and believe the plugin should show in my dashboard, however I would be grateful for your advice please.

The most likely reason in this case is that there is another plugin that they need to install, the instructions for which are included in Alan’s video, but I will summarise here.

They need to install “Timber”, which is a plugin that ours is dependant on, and they need to make sure both “Timber” and “Vacation Soup for Vacation Rental Owners” are activated. Then you will see what is in the picture.

I just installed the Vacation Soup Plugin and published my first post. Just wondering, is there a way to remove the date it is published? I’d like to post more evergreen topics and it would be nice to remove the date but haven’t found a way to do it.

There are few more effective ways of displaying ignorance than joining an internet forum but here goes: to create a post using the VS Plugin I will need to ask my developers to upload it. There’s currently nothing in the dashboard menu that says “Plugins”. Although charming people they’re twitchy about me rooting around in the site (I do simple updates myself) in case I screw things up.. So I’m going to have to say “look I want to use VS and engage in attraction marketing via stories, videos etc”

The problem is I have no idea where any of these things will appear on my own website or what it may do to the look and architecture. Can anyone make sense of this and offer me some advice. It may be worth mentioning that the site is 8 properties, shortly to be 10…..

Wordpress shows posts, in fact it is accurate to say that is its raison d’être. How it shows them (what they look like) and where it shows them (which menu link or links) is up to the Theme you use, and up to any modifications you (or your devs) decide to put in. There is usually a blog link, or posts link, but it is very much up to the theme and any changes you make.

Our plugin helps you write posts. Our plugin also sends all your posts to the Soup to be displayed within our site. Our plugin does not change how the posts appear in your site, it just helps you get get to the point that you have a published post.

If you ask a 3rd party to set up Vacation Soup, as most 3rd parties don’t seem to read instructions, they will need to install “Vacation Soup for VR Owners” and they will also need to install “Timber” (a tool that our plugin uses). It does tell them on-screen that they need to install Timber, but if I had $1 for every time they have said “it doesn’t work” due to lack of Timber I would have, well, several $ at least.

The process of installing the plugins is very easy, I just tried it and it requires precisely 6 clicks and 45 seconds. So while they may say “There are lots of risks, we need to check a, b and c etc” you can comfortably tell them it is easy as pie.

My website builder installed Timber and your Vacation Soup Blogging Plugin (please see my previous posts here – as Francis said they did not check the instructions at first!). Since then my WordPress CMS and Dashboard has been extremely slow with the time between clicking on a item and it being displayed taking 25-30 seconds and then the same delay for the next step! This is almost unworkable. My builder suggested the problem was caused by the VS Plugin, so I agreed that it be removed it to test if it was the cause.
They tell me “We had to delete the plugin as when we accessed your dashboard, Timber had removed the whole dashboard, providing Timber as the only settings. We can’t recommend you having your dashboard like that, as we need to be able to update various things, and this wouldn’t be possible with the dashboard not showing any of the other settings that are required.”
This cannot be right! It seems to work for everyone else! Can you please advise?

Firstly, yes you are correct, this is not right. The speed issue and the lack of menu are both wrong, the best way for me to solve this is to gain access to your admin. Can you please contact me either on chat or by email Francis@vacationsoup.com and I will diagnose and (helpfully) correct it.